What if I already paid a bill?

If you've already paid a bill outside of QuickBooks, you don't have to enter
the bill in QuickBooks.
If you want QuickBooks to track all your bills for accounting purposes, however,
you can enter the bill anyway.

In this case, use the
Enter Bills window to enter the bill, and then use
the Pay Bills window to record the payment.
You can then skip the rest of this Help topic.

If you don't enter the bill in the Enter Bills window, you still
need to assign the payment to the appropriate expense account,
depending on how you paid the bill in the first place: